Remember when a terrorist was a fanatic who detonated a suicide vest in a pizzeria?

Or maybe hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings?

Or exploded busses and subways and attacked music venues with multiple suicide jihadists...?

That was the golden era of terror. 

Like journalism, terrorism isn't what it used to be.

Today, all you have to do to get your official terrorist badge, is toot your horn!

That's right!

Toot your horn in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you're right up there with the worst jihadi-al queda-ISIS-towel-head 'o terror pizzeria shoe-bombers of all time!

At least in Canada.

Trudeau to truckers: Go home or I'll call you more bad words

Setting aside for a moment the actual issues at the core of this crisis, isn't it the responsibility of the leader of the country to show leadership?

Hiding, dodging, name-calling and doubling down on an ill-advised strategy of refusing dialogue isn't a sign of leadership. It's a sign of a government seriously out of touch with what's going on in the country. There is no coherent strategy to be seen, other than plenty more of the same.

Once the border disruptions begins to bite, the PMO will be fielding calls from pissed-off CEOs who don't give a shit about Trudeau's excuses. "I don't talk to racist a-holes" may sell to the terminally woke, but ain't gonna cut it in the real world.

Part of the problem is a cultural divide. You can bet there's not a lot of folks in those trucks with four year Liberal Arts degrees. To them, a Confederate flag isn't a symbol of white supremacy, it's a symbol of the Dukes of Hazzard. The Duke boys even had Black buddies, so how the fuck can that be racist?

It's time for Mr Trudeau to show some leadership. If he's not up to the job, he needs to step down.

For the American Empire, it's now or never

May you live in interesting times, an ancient Chinese curse supposedly says.

Must be true, because we sure do!

Kinda unnerving to see all those headlines day after day, for months on end, about how Putin will, for sure, probably invade Ukraine any day now, maybe.

In the meantime, we’ll ship them hundreds of millions in missiles and small arms… don’t worry, we’re lending them the money to buy this stuff.

Not that we’re planning to actually defend the schmucks from Russia in the event our dreams of invasion come true. Are you kidding?

That’s been the US-NATO game for the past few months, and it’s no wonder the NATO allies are getting nervous. The Big Dog is in grave danger of losing a significant number of the pack. The collapse of NATO is the end of the US Empire in and of itself.

Then there’s the Iran file. We had a reasonable agreement in place to curtail Iran’s nuke ambitions, but thanks to the goading of our Israeli allies, Trump nixed that deal. The Israeli’s still love to talk about Iran being weeks from a bomb, but after saying that for thirty-plus years, they don’t even believe it themselves. Nor are they planning to do anything about it, blood-curdling rhetoric aside. Israel wouldn’t last a week if real (ie not homemade by Gaza rocketeers) missiles were incoming at the rate of hundreds per day.

Don’t forget we gotta take on China at the same time as we’re putting Russia and Iran in their place. The military-industrial sector of the economy, the folks who fund all those brilliant think tanks forever advocating more war and more weapon sales, are all in for ramping up confrontation with China. At the same time, uber-hedgies managing trillions of dollars, guys like Larry Fink, are hunky dory doing business with the commies, so don’t count on the universal support of the billionaire class.

In summary, the American Empire as we have known it is over.

Numero uno no more.

Only America's war-profiteers don’t know it yet.

They truly believe their upcoming triumph over Putin will cement their place as the "Exceptional Nation" for generations to come.

Satan's leaf rake strikes again

Further to my brilliant expose of the leaf-blower from ten years ago., I see where this tool of the Devil just took a few more otherwise innocent victims in Florida.

I use the word "innocent" with reservations. After all, nobody who owns a leaf-blower is "innocent." They've all got blood on their hands, at least metaphorically speaking.

Or not so metaphorically, in the case of Kyong Moulton. Kyong has been pushed right over the brink by this infernal technology. Her big mistake, obviously, was to buy the cursed thing in the first place, no doubt provoked by that "keeping-up-with-the-Jones's" ethos that permeates consumer culture.

In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Once she has the leaf-blower, she is soon engaged in a leaf-blower feud with the neighbors. They blow the leaves onto her lawn. She blows them right back! The escalation came to a head on the weekend, when Myong snapped, attacking her neighbours with, of all things, a steak knife!

So now she's in jail, and the neighbours are in hospital. I don't blame any of them...

Somewhere in Hell, Dom Quinto and Gustav Doragrip are clinking glasses and laughing their asses off.

Ottawa declares emergency after week-long terrorist attack of horn-honking

Yes, that's the language being bandied about - it's a terrorist attack! Our democracy is under siege!! Who is behind this? Putin? Trump? Joe Rogan?

The truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates has gone form “small fringe group with unacceptable ideas” to a nationwide terrorist uprising, and our legacy media and assorted spin doctors are just warming up.

Notice the not-so-subtle threat inflation in the descriptors; the small fringe of wackos has morphed into an existential threat to our very democracy in a mere nine days! As the convoys made their way to Toronto, the massive outpouring of public support put a lie to the “small fringe” theory. It’s OMG time, as in OMG it’s our own 9/11!

Bear in mind the absurdity of the mandates being protested. In Ontario, unvaccinated teachers are permitted to spend their workday in the company of children, who are not mandated either. In Quebec, unvaccinated health-care workers remain employed in hospitals and LTC homes. But an unvaccinated trucker who spends virtually their entire working life sitting alone in the cab of a truck needs to quarantine for two weeks when crossing the border? And this life-saving rule is implemented two years into the pandemic, when other countries are lifting restrictions?

I’d like to see the science on that!

Part of the reason for Canada’s incoherent mish-mash of rules is that each provincial or territorial leader has their own coterie of health and science advisers. If we ever get to the post-mortem on how governments handled the pandemic, hopefully we’ll figure out how to build a more robust national health care system that doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel thirteen times over every time there’s a health crisis.

Before we get there, though, we need to get over the current impasse. Trudeau’s handlers obviously see their confrontational approach as a vote-getter. All they really need to do is sit tight and let the media run wild with their smear campaign, and time is on their side, or so they think.

So brace yourself for an onslaught of nonsense like that floated last week in the pages of the Globe and Mail; US extremist white-nationalist truckers bringing guns to their Canadian brethren in Ottawa…

By the way, a news channel in India found some Sikhs protesting in support of those white supremacists in Ottawa.

It’s a beautiful thing!

Snowmobile trails are open

I know this because when I step out on the stoop for a breath of fresh air, in addition to the howling of the coyotes, I also hear the howling of the snowmobiles.

To be fair, snowmobiles don't howl nearly as obnoxiously now as they did twenty years ago, when you had two-stroke triples with expansion chamber exhausts splitting the heavens.

The snowmobile trail shares the Kinch Sideroad with my hiking trail. There's nothing like a hike in the pristine woods, breathing in that fresh forest air, and then eight snowmobiles go by, polluting ears and lungs simultaneously. It's a real buzz kill.

At the same time, I get the attraction. It's got a motor and goes fast. What's not to like?

I remember back in the first snowmobile wave, before there was such a thing as a trail network, taking an Arctic Cat from Guelph to Fergus, through fields and on back-roads. It was a fun adventure, and I can see where folks can get seriously caught up in it.

The real serious ones are into 300 hp mountain sleds now.

You read about them every avalanche season

Goodbye Trudeau, hello PM Freeland

PM Fluffy has painted himself into a corner. By announcing early and often that he would never countenance negotiations with those vile protesters, he’s left the door wide open to his possible rivals.

Like Chrystia Freeland.

As one of the foreign meddlers in Ukrain’s Maidan, she knows a thing or two about popular uprisings.

She knows Justin is on the wrong side of history.

She’s waiting back-stage till it’s time to roll out the right side of history.

Make no mistake; there’ll be plenty of Chrystia Freeland in your future.

She’s our next PM for sure, Nazi baggage and all.